Jun 16 2023
By:
Scott Sumner
Do dumb people hold dumb ideas? I'd say not necessarily. There are a host of issues where my views are probably closer to the view of the typical dumb person than to the views of a sophisticated reader of the New Yorker magazine. And even where I disagree with the views of dumb people, it's quite possible that they are...
Jun 16 2023
By:
Alberto Mingardi
Silvio Berlusconi passed away on Monday. His state funeral (a beautiful ceremony in Milan's Cathedral) took place on Wednesday. Not many foreign dignitaries attended: basically, the only one of note was Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, not a darling of the West these days. Yet former Spanish prime minister José ...
Jun 16 2023
By:
David Henderson
I'll save you the suspense: I think it is. Drug company Merck is suing Medicare. What's its beef? Merck claims that certain changes in the way Medicare will pay for drugs are coercing Merck, forcing it to sell drugs at below-market prices. But Cato health economist Michael F. Cannon disagrees. He says that there is ...
Jun 15 2023
By:
Pierre Lemieux
A recent Financial Times report (“India Drops Evolution and Periodic Table from Some School Textbooks,” June 6, 2023) adds to the bad news we have been hearing from India: India has dropped Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the periodic table of elements from some school textbooks, part of a widening camp...
Jun 15 2023
By:
Vance Ginn
The debt ceiling fiasco is over, and with it, the costly Inflation Reduction Act, or as I like to call it, the Inflation Recession Act, was unfortunately left mostly intact. Congress's lackluster attempt to curb spending will matter even less considering this, as new calculations show. The time is ripe for a reassessme...
Jun 15 2023
By:
David Henderson
Thirty days have passed since my Wall Street Journal obit of Bob Lucas was published, so I can reproduce it below. Robert E. Lucas Jr. Brought Rationality to Macroeconomics A Nobel laureate and a giant in the field dies at 85. By David R. Henderson May 15, 2023 at 6:01 pm ET (May 16 print edition)...
Jun 14 2023
By:
Scott Sumner
Here's Encyclopedia Britannica: laissez-faire, (French: “allow to do”) policy of minimum governmental interference in the economic affairs of individuals and society. The origin of the term is uncertain, but folklore suggests that it is derived from the answer Jean-Baptiste Colbert, comptroller general of fina...
Read this Pierre Lemieux Book Review
May 1 2023
By Pierre Lemieux
A Book Review of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, by Friedrich A. Hayek. Jeremy Shearmur, editor.1 Friedrich Hayek's trilogy Law, Legislation, and Liberty, published in three separate volumes in 1973, 1976, and 1979, was recently republished in a single book under the careful editorship of Jeremy Shearmur. The l...
Jun 14 2023
By:
David Henderson
One of the best features of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the introduction of “expensing” for capital investments. Translation: Corporations that made capital investments could deduct (i.e., expense) those costs from taxable income in the year they made those expenditures. The only condition for expen...
Jun 14 2023
By:
Kevin Corcoran
It’s been observed many times that there is a fundamental divide in how people view the idea of fairness, with one side viewing fairness as being process oriented, while the other views fairness as being outcome oriented. In the process view, as long as everyone plays by the same rules, things are fair, and the resul...
Jun 13 2023
By:
Scott Sumner
Many pundits view financial crises as exogenous shocks that impact the business cycle. I've argued that most financial crises are actually endogenous, caused by the business cycle. There is very little evidence that financial crises have much effect on output, except when bank failures lead to currency hoarding that a ...
Jun 13 2023
By:
Pierre Lemieux
Contrary to what economists believe, there are no scarce resources. The public debt is a “social convention” as are government deficits. The physical world, however, is not infinite, and constitutes the sine qua non condition of mankind’s existence. There is one scarce resource: the Earth. Preserving mankind from...
Jun 13 2023
By:
David Henderson
I'm going through old copies of the Journal of Law and Economics, the first journal to which I subscribed, before sending them off to a young woman who is majoring in economics and thinking about going into a graduate program. I came across an article by my UCLA industrial organization professor, Sam Peltzman. I took h...
Jun 12 2023
By:
Marcus Shera
The most powerful weapon in an economist’s arsenal is the law of demand. When the price (or opportunity cost) of something increases, people will purchase, consume, or choose it less often. The law of demand is a common backbone for many arguments. If the spine breaks the body falls. Naturally, those who want to unde...
Jun 12 2023
By:
David Henderson
Pierre Lemieux pointed out a crucial way in which Wall Street Journal reporter James Mackintosh biased the result with this statement: "Sure, it is true that free markets are the best way to run an economy that is fully competitive, has no unpriced side effects, or 'externalities,' such as carbon emissions, and where c...
Jun 11 2023
By:
Scott Sumner
The Financial Times recently interviewed Daron Acemoglu: The research shows that major technological disruption — such as the Industrial Revolution — can flatten wages for an entire class of working people. It also points to the distributional conflict and power dynamics inherent in it. “Yes, you got progress,...